i used to think so too.

I feel that it's important to note, we don't all wear our scars on our skin.

We all battle dragons, and they come in all sizes and they leave all sorts of messes. We rot inside with our built-up bitterness. We hold tight to our warped mirror images, our wishes for ribs and collar bones and leg gaps and shadowless existence. We tell ourselves we'll never be good enough for love, or healthier love at least. We're left with what they did to us, how they broke our bodies or our spirits, with abusive hands and lips. We wonder why our feelings flutter the way they do, why we're different, why that's wrong. We have bad nights and days and showers and car rides home. We stare at the ruins of our temples and wonder what to do next, wonder why we burned them out in the first place. We're sick, or sad, or both. We have mistakes and aches and all of them mean as much as the others; we're all just people, connected, in the end.

We have scars on our hearts.

But it's not the scars that matter, it's where we go from there, and whether or not we let them keep us from happiness.

birds; part I.

She wears a circus-tent, striped yellow and red,

oversized from her collar to her barefeet,

an abandoned circus tent--

the animals have been long set free,

and the empty rings

without a ringmaster

rest against her anklebones.

He runs like drumbeats, hair yellow, cheeks red,

all stretch and half stumble,

to abandoned playgrounds--

the children all hide from the rain,

and his breath paints

the air with fog,

inside the tunnel slide like a waterfall.

aw whatever.

Don't whine to me about self-control.

(Not that I know anything of kisses or who I'd want them with anymore, really. I'm just saying. You're not even trying.)

i just like fox metaphors.

It started with a whisper then a touch by the window in the cabin in the forest in the skull of a tiny speck on this reality. 

The fox swiped its tail under the mask-creature's chin, orange fur lighting crimson-cheeked fire beneath the wooden face--a spark and then a supernova's glaring heat, catching like disease in a body-piled gutter.

The creature's toes are blistered now, curled against the hardwood and pointed inward with its knees. Leathery skin peels from its shoulders and molten flesh melts from its thighs, mock-body shedding paint and coarse hair and meat and costume. Scars encircle its fingers and cross its sweaty palms. Desperate words leave red chapped lips, evanesce, all smoke, slipping up the chimney and out the cracks beneath the doors. 

The fox set the creature ablaze by innocent accident or knowing acceptance, but either way the creature's no phoenix suited to taking the abuse, neither another fox who can match the temperature in turn. It's a conflict of passions; or rather the presence and absence of such.

The mask is nothing now but charcoal, we'll soon see the creature's gnarled face. And the fox will devour the perfectly blood-boiled heart.

It will be fine, this is how things go.

the 4'o'clock.

You and I, two trains,
we run on
parallel
tracks
from here to there

or there to here.

We are the same,
the same beasts-- Trains
like two metal tigers
with billboard stripes
and tunnel roars.

We will never meet,
unless Catastrophe
plays our matchmaker.
... But selfishly I still hope
for a
crashing.

polls.

That picture bothered me the first time that I saw it, even before I had turned eighteen and even before I was registered to vote.

I'm not crazy about patriotism. I'm not gung-ho AMERICA.
... But there are things that matter to me. Things I need to protect. Things that affect me.
And that's why I'm voting.

I suppose men and women have fought
for your right to not vote, as well.
It's a free country.

I don't like fireworks, they're too loud and every Fourth of July I can't stop imagining my house as a burned-black hull painted with the ashes of my tangible treasures, charred, fire-hose-soaked remains of everything I've always known.
But that's my melodramatic mental haunt; the colors are pretty.

I don't know why I thought you were level-headed,
dictionaries hit the floor!